Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Greetings Friends and Family!

A rainy Christmas day today but this makes for a good excuse to sit down and write something to update all of you about our year. The past year has been incredibly busy but, as a consequence, also quite fulfilling. We have been back in California for five and a half years now. Many things have changed over the course of the year and it has been mixed with both sadness and joy. Regardless, we count our blessings and good fortune as we move into a new year.

Ruth continues to work for Case Western Reserve University and has enjoyed further advancement and changes in her responsibilities. She has been traveling to more conferences and has been back to Cleveland a couple of times over the past year. She has enjoyed the new challenges that her work presents and appreciates the opportunity to telecommute from home.

Ruth has been diving back into her craft work. She has been making some wonderful bracelets and continuing to work on her knitting projects. Ruth's sister Julie has been a huge help with our garden and made it possible for us to grow some vegetables this year and take advantage of the prolonged growing season we enjoy here in California. We have had our typical crop of limes, pomegranates,
leeks, and now lemons and oranges are coming in. Unfortunately, we have not had many figs and olives since those trees are still quite immature. Hopefully next year we'll have a bigger yield and get some more figs and olives on top of the wonderful citrus we enjoy.

My work at Loma Linda University has gone very well this year. I have managed to obtain funding from both NIH and NASA and I have developed some excellent collaborations with colleagues here and maintained collaborations with dear friends and colleagues back at CWRU. My first PhD student from LLU, Paul Williams, graduated in May and has moved on to the next phase of his life. I have two new grad students, Lorraine and Tyler, and they are working on very interesting projects that expand upon our previous work on neuroinflammation. I look forward to the new scientific directions we are moving into.

Rhaya, my technician for the past three years until August, has also moved on to medical school and is fulfilling the goals that she has had for so long in her life. She was able to train her replacement, Jonathan, and he has rapidly become an indispensable part of the lab. We also have a Neonatology Fellow, Brad, who is working on an exciting project. So, all in all, the lab is a bustling and productive place right now. The energy and enthusiasm of our lab family is inspiring and makes me happy and excited to come to work each day. As always, we are working on new grants and manuscripts and we have managed to get four papers out this year with a few more in preparation.

Because work has kept me so busy with research and teaching, I have had very little time for guitar building or anything else outside of work and church responsibilities. I am still playing with our grizzled old man rock 'n blues band with colleagues from LLU and we now have a set list together that should allow us to play a few shows in the coming year. At least that's what we hope to do!  Since I haven't had time to build any more guitars, I finally broke down and bought a lovely new Stratocaster in sage green metallic. I also bought a 2017 Kawasaki Versys 650 motorcycle. I have to say this is the most comfortable and fuel efficient motorcycle I have ever had the pleasure of riding. It has a 250 mile range and routinely gets about 60 mpg. With gas prices so expensive in SoCal, the Versys makes my commute sane and affordable.

Ruth's mother, Alice, passed away early this year quite suddenly after she took a fall. We were very surprised and were fortunate to have Ruth's sister, Sue, staying with us to help assuage the grief. We had a lovely memorial service at the Catholic church where she worshiped here in Banning. Many of the sisters were able to attend and we had lots of photos and stories to remember Alice and her life. With both Ruth's father and mother now gone, we had a delightful family reunion up at Lake Almanor and remembered them both. Many of their old friends from Moke Hill attended and it was wonderful to have so many around to memorialize their lives and celebrate their legacy.

We look forward to the new year and are planning some trips to visit family and friends back east.

Love,

Chris, Ruth, Mauve, and Jerry

Today was the anniversary of my father-in-law's passing. Tim was a laconic man who always laughed at my jokes and was kind and supportive of our relationship. Ruth was afraid of her father when she was younger and, later craved a closer relationship with him. In the last years of his life, his health deteriorated and that had a dramatic impact on many members of the family, if not MOST of the family. Our desire to be close to Tim and Alice was the primary motivator for our move from Cleveland, Ohio to Loma Linda, California.

We were able to spend the last year of his life close to Alice, Tim, and George and help out in whatever way we could. We relished the opportunity to be there with them and provide a distraction from the everyday routine and the troubles of age and infirmity. I hope we did a good job in that role.

Tim was always strong and independent over the 23 years that I knew him. As his body failed, Ruth and I could feel the frustration as he struggled to communicate and move. I cannot imagine what that was like for him. When he made the decision to stop his dialysis treatments on Christmas Day, 2014 we were saddened but understood exactly why he made that choice. In his circumstances I like to think I would have the courage to make the same decision.

We drove up through the night/morning of January 30/31st to drop Ruth off in Napa, where Alice and Tim had moved to an assisted living facility. I am so glad that we were able to make that journey and Ruth had the opportunity to be there in Tim's last days and provide support for Alice and her sisters. We miss you Tim.

Settling in to SoCal....

Ruth and I moved to Loma Linda, California, on June 28th, 2013. In the months leading up to the move we had so much going on that I just relied on my Facebook page for updates to friends and family. Now that we're more settled, I thought I'd post a blog update to let everyone know what's going on.

Most of you may already know that the main motivator for our move was to be closer to Ruth's parents so we can help her sister take care of them. They're both getting up there and they have a lovely large house and garden that require a good amount of labor to keep up with. They have strawberries, lemons, limes, tomatoes, etc. Since moving out we have tried to spend at least a couple of days with them—one of those days centered around a master "to do" list to take care of things around the house and yard.  Ruth's sister (and mother!) is a great cook so we get spoiled by the wonderful food she prepares when we come out. We are certainly enjoying our time with family.

The move was not a decision that we took lightly. I spent most of last year trying to secure funding so that I wouldn't be fired from my position in Cleveland and, if she so desired, Ruth could quit her job, come out to SoCal and help her folks while giving her sister a break. That didn't work out. With Federal funding for science in the gutter these days, I haven't been able to secure any substantial funding that would provide us with the security to allow Ruth to quit her job. Luckily, I was offered a position here in Loma Linda and that made the decision to move easier. Still, we had built a lovely life in Cleveland so it was difficult to leave our adopted home town.

The move did NOT go as smoothly as we would have liked. The movers were delayed so that created an insurmountable time crunch domino train for our contractors that delayed plaster repair, painting, floor refinishing, etc. so that the house didn't even get on the market until a couple of weeks ago—very late in the real estate season for Cleveland. Compounding that issue, our solar panels confuse mid-westerners. One realtor toured the place with a family that didn't understand the "solar gadget" in the backyard.  Naturally this is frustrating to Ruth and me. We did the best we could to modify the house to make it more self-sustaining (minimizing water and power bills) and resilient to the power fluctuations that occur in that part of the country. The general ignorance of alternative energy in Cleveland was frustrating from the beginning but it's even more troubling when you consider the media attention given to global warming now. Catch up people.

Originally our intention was to have a leisurely trip west so that we could stop and visit family/friends whom we haven't seen in quite some time. With the delay from the movers we ended up trapped in an incredibly constricted time window that had us leaving Cleveland at 6pm, Wed the 26th of June and arriving in Loma Linda at midnight on Fri the 28th. Ruth and I are really good at long-distance driving (we've driven all up and down the east coast and from Maryland to St. Louis in heroic trips). My brother and I even drove from St. Louis, MO to Sacramento, CA in 36 hours (southern route people!). So I have experienced crazy drives throughout my life. This time we bit off a bit much.

The impetus for the crazy road trip was my overwhelming desire to fulfill my word to my new employer. I said that I would be on-site on July 1st and that was what I was going to do. In retrospect, I should have just said, "Look, we've been delayed due to mover screw-ups and I'm going to be a week later than I expected." Now, I know, that probably would have been fine. At the time I didn't realize that. Compounding this issue, Ruth had put in for a week of leave for our trip and, by the time the movers had arrived and packed us up, that week was almost over. So both Ruth and I were motivated to get back on the clock.

An added "bonus" feature for the trip was our desire to take Mauve-the-dog and Crazy-cat with us in the Subaru. We have only had Mauve since we adopted her in Dec, 2012 and Crazy is not a happy car traveler. We had taken Mauve on a few short-distance trips and they seemed to really stress her out. Not so good. Adding to the fun, the cat hates the dog and the dog cannot resist the chance to come stare closely at the cat (enraging the cat of course!). Naturally, hilarity ensues (oh SO untrue). We tried to mitigate some of the madness. In the last few hours before leaving Cleveland, we were cleaning like mad, doing some spot painting, sweeping up the detritus to make way for the professionals AND we decided to drug the cat in preparation for a late road-trip.

Acepromazine was once used as an anti-psychotic in humans but it didn't work so well. Now, veterinarians use it to sedate nervous animals. We decided to try sedating Crazy-cat with Ace. Unfortunately, I don't think we got enough into her system. Ruth has far less experience handling animals than I do so her first attempt made for an angry kitty with ACE smeared all over her lips and fur. I got into the narrow closet that the cat had hidden in and dosed her with what (we thought!) should be enough to relax the big girl. We put a little mylar-covered insulation panel in front of the door to keep Mauve-the-dog from bothering Crazy while she mellowed out and went about our business. About 30 minutes later, Mauve and I were happily sweeping up the room that the cat-containing-closet opened on when we heard the most horrendous yowls coming from said closet. Mauve, brave girl that she is, decided to go investigate. Oh bad idea. The cat, with pink-frothed mouth, crawled over the insulation panel and, bobbing like a drunk, went after Mauve. Mauve, wisely now, decided to retreat while barking (I presume she was shouting the canine equivalent of "Help, a mad cat is attacking me!"). I went after Mauve too, to pick her up and get her clear of the very angry Crazy-cat. We beat a hasty retreat and closed the door to the room with a slam like a couple of poor, frightened living in the Walking Dead!

Ruth, meanwhile, heard the commotion and came to see what we had gotten into. Wide-eyed Mauve and equally wide-eyed Chris tried to explain the situation. Ruth decided to herd the cat back into the closet—successfully—but  she too concluded that the cat was a hazardous element now. Rather than sedating the cat, we had turned her into a psychotic-aggressive-shred-biomachine. Ugh. At this point, we finished up cleaning and started to load the car for the trip. We decided to put Mauve up in the front seat on her bed and Crazy would be in the back of the car inside Mauve's crate (which is rarely used by Mauve). This meant that one-half of the back seat was folded down with the cat-containing crate next to the remaining passenger seat. I was in the seat covered with backpacks, laptop bags, pillows, and all sort of other things that made me immobile. We had put a blanket and some plastic bags between the crate and my arm. Ruth was driving the first leg.

We started heading west at 6pm and very shortly the chorus of howls from the cat began. Mauve-the-dog was trying to lunge over the front seat while barking, the cat looked like an angry, incoherent stoner, and Ruth and I were just trying to keep them from attacking each other! Eventually, they both calmed down. Crazy-cat would transition from stupor to mania and, during these manic periods, she'd shred the bags and pull aside the blanket that was separating me from the cage and start shredding my arm. Usually this would happen about the time that I was dozing off. This went on through the night.

By the time we stopped to switch over, the cat had (mostly) mellowed out. We had breakfast in Iowa and then drove through to Golden, CO to spend the evening at Ruth's sister's place, catch up with our nephew, and enjoy dinner with our good friend Nathan, who had left Cleveland just two months before us. Nathan is a talented engineer who is now working for a wonderful software company in Colorado Springs. He kindly drove up and met us for dinner at Sherpa House but had to drive back home to work the next day. I went to see World War Z (meh—I'm not a big zombie fan like my brother) with our nephew while Ruth crashed out at her sister's house. We got up early the next day, packed up the animals, and boogied.

We only had a 14 hour drive to Loma Linda and we both love the landscape of the west so we took a few breaks for pictures (check the Facebook page folks!). The only remaining hitch in the giddy up was that we needed to stop at Ruth's folks' house to pick up an AeroBed since our furniture was on the moving truck (left far behind us). By the time we got to their house, it was around 11:30pm and we had to double back to our new rental place. Not our easiest drive but certainly not the worst long-distance drive I've ever been on. Remind me some time and I'll tell you the story of the hail-ridden trip from St. Louis to Sacramento that Bran and I did in 36 hours! Phew, that was a crazy one....

Sunny SoCal

Ruth and I are down in southern California visiting her parents and spending time with a subset of her sisters. The weather was challenging when we first came in last Friday (snow!) but it's warmed up to the mid-70's today and should be in the low 80's over the weekend. I bring this up because it's GREAT!

Cleveland is horribly depressing from Jan to Mar in a typical year and we've found that the best possible thing for us to do is get out of town to some sunny place for a week or so to avoid morbid depression.

Unfortunately, even though I'm on "vacation" I'm still not on vacation. I have a manuscript to finish and some work to do on a colleague's grant and I need to do some reading and work on my own grant. So I have plenty to do.

I also signed up for a Coursera course on Digital Sound Design (taught by an Emory prof) and that's been great fun because he's using OSS software that runs on Macs, Linux, and Windoze. Very nice! I've learned a lot and the course has inspired new ideas about how to get guitar noize into the computer and transmogrify it into something more entertaining than my analog playing. Unfortunately, there are enough lectures (and two exams) that I have to keep up on them. Regardless, it's fun and informative so I'm expanding my horizons and learning new things—the pattern I thrive on.

In other news, I have two guitars to finish building when I get back to Cleveland! Pics will follow....

2012 almost gone!

Wow. Ok, I've been very bad about posting on the blog. My apologies. What has happened in the past year? Well, the work situation is still extremely high-stress and the funding situation hasn't gotten any better really. So I'm holding on by a thread right now.

My time-management and work-flow niggles have DEFINITELY become less problematic. I'm still using org-mode to handle most of my "to-do" and many other things (including taking notes in meetings!) and it works so well that I've given up on the daily paper to-do list as it takes too much time to write out and I can get more done by recapturing that 20 min to really think out my day.

My Audi has now died. The transmission failed and it's too expensive to replace when I consider the long-term value of the car and how much it's cost to keep it running for the last two years. I love the car though. When it's in tip top shape it's a fantastic driver and was designed for people like me. Now it's a liability that I can't afford.

One of my Christmas break projects is to get some plastering and painting downstairs. If I get that done then I can get back to work on my black telecaster which just needs wiring completed. Also, I'm going to do the best I can to avoid going in to work over the next 6 days. We'll see how that goes.

That's all for now....

Welcome to 2012

I am SO glad to see a new year! December was horrible. Our niece died from what appears to be a ventricular tachycardia problem that must be familial. Our house was broken into and robbed the Tuesday before Christmas. My wife was bending over to pick some leeks (for soup on New Year's Eve) out of the garden and then threw her back out necessitating a trip to the ER. Ugh.

In all fairness, the rest of the year was fine. No major problems (other than the daily struggle to get grants and maintain a high level of productivity in the lab I mean) throughout the majority of 2011 and them BAMMO! Welcome to December. Ruth's family (and the two of us) are still trying to process the grief. My sister-in-law has been amazingly strong. The memorial service was a challenge as the family asked me to perform the service and the majority of the family who could make it to Michigan participated. Our niece's mother even performed two very beautiful pieces on bass and we all cried. A lot.

For me, trying to sit outside of myself and process the grief has been helpful. We were warned by my sister-in-law that the grief would come and go in waves and that's precisely how it seemed to work—one minute you're fine and trying to get about the day and the next you're crying in a heap and feel hopeless. Very difficult to deal with. It's better now but STILL sneaks up on me periodically and cripples me for a time. I see the same pattern in Ruth.

We have lost many of our family and friends in the past few years. I have attended far too many funerals in the last five years than I think I should have as a man of 45 years but this has been our reality. Most of our losses have been older family members (my 83 year old grandmother, my 82 year old great uncle, my aunt after a stroke and progressive decline, etc.) and we have lost friends who have battled with liver cancer and leukemia. Our niece was only 16 years old. She was healthy (apparently), happy, and a wonderful, bright, shining light in our lives. We live far from both sides of our families and having my sister-in-law and niece move all the way from France to within a three hour drive has been wonderful for us over the last two years. We have gone to visit them as often as we could. Our niece's birthday was a week earlier than mine and we had enjoyed celebrating together over the past two years.

Because we were the closest family to them, we were the first to arrive after she passed away. We had the opportunity to say goodbye and feel the gravity of losing her and being assured that she was gone. Even the memory makes me cry now. We looked forward to seeing her grow up and become another of the beautiful and accomplished women in my wife's family. We wanted to see her marry and have children and get to know her as an independent, fully-formed person. We know that she is so wonderful. She is tall, 5'11'', deep red hair, willowy, bright blue eyes, quiet, but intense, brilliant but humble. We miss her.

So this loss was/is the hardest of them all. We still feel the hole in our lives and I expect that we always WILL feel the hole. Shocking. I can't even imagine what it feels like for her father and mother. Everything else that happened in Dec was filtered through a numbed fog. Ah, all our valuables are stolen.... So be it. Ruth's back was painful but, once we were sure the problem didn't require surgery, we knew we could deal with it.

December was very strange for us and, moving into 2012, we know that we are irrevocably changed but at least we have hope that the new year will bring us some peace and distance from the pain. Of course we will never forget.

Funding or Firing!

Scientific research has entered the age of "get funded or get fired." Since my position depends on "soft-money" (which means I'm supposed to fund 90% of my salary in grants) my job is in jeopardy. While this isn't a fun place to be, I have always known the risks and possibility of this happening. That's life—if you want to have fun and do science, you accept the risk that your nation will choose to expend its resources on senseless conflict and drain the pool of cash for research and development. :-) I guess you can see where my biases might lie.

So, much like my last post, I'm working very hard as often as possible. The summer is always very busy with students populating the lab and, my chief tech moved on to another lab this past summer. Very hairy time. Nonetheless, I have been in the lab far more lately than in the past five years or so and that's been fun for me (maybe less so for the students!) as I have been revamping my laboratory's focus and working to make the lab a leaner/meaner, agile tool.

I have continued to refine my workflow issues and have become far better at managing my time than in years past. I am still relying on a mix of emacs org-mode for a master priority list and paper calendar sheets for daily tasking (stuck into the back of my lab notebook). This seems to work well and keeps me very organized. I have done very little manuscript writing this summer but I have been reviewing papers from a bunch of different journals on an almost weekly basis. Unfortunately, due to the volume, I am often late getting my comments back to the editor and that's an ongoing source of frustration (for me as much as for them!). I've cut back on the number of papers that I am willing to review but that has been balanced by the increase in requests. Frankly, if a paper is within my areas of expertise, I usually say `yes' and I find that I learn a lot about current state-of-the-art in my field. It seems to me that I exist in an interesting niche with expertise in Physiology/Neurophysiology, developmental Neuroscience, and computational modeling.

In other news I've been learning R as I can't afford to pay staff statisticians a whole bunch of money to build statistical models for me. Nargh. Luckily, we have a class through Epidemiology and Biostatistics on R programming so I'm muddling through. The class is taking a HUGE chunk of my time but this is good for me and I find it interesting and very useful—potentially. Also, there's a great add-on for emacs called ess which stands for "emacs speaks statistics" and this has been a life-saver. I can run R within an emacs window and have all the editingfeatures and syntax highlighting that I know and love available.

I suppose that's all for now. I realize this has been a long gap but I have been extremely busy and, even now, I'm avoiding programming homework to post. LOL!